Travel Search Pulse is a newsletter about SEO and organic growth in the travel industry: how travelers find trips, who gets found, and what the people responsible for it should do about it.
That includes the biggest shift search has seen in twenty years. AI now sits between the traveler and the results, and travel queries, the itineraries, the comparisons, the “where should I go in October,” are exactly what it answers well. I treat AI search as the evolution of SEO, not a replacement for it, and I write about both: where the ground is moving, and the practical SEO opportunities still sitting in plain sight.
Who writes it
I’m Jesse James Woods. I spent eleven years at KAYAK, one of the world’s leading travel search engines, where I led SEO and localization across seven brands, more than 60 markets, and 25+ languages, and owned an organic search channel that grew into a revenue engine worth over $100M a year. For more than five years I was also Managing Director of KAYAK Germany, running a 100-plus person office. Before KAYAK, I led SEO at HolidayCheck, one of the DACH region’s biggest travel platforms. Fifteen-plus years in SEO altogether, most of them in travel.
Why I write it
Travel is ground zero for AI search. The questions I spent a decade working on inside one of the industry’s biggest brands are now open questions for everyone. I write to work them out in public, with data.
What you get
Two things. Essays: my analysis of the travel search landscape, built on real data and firsthand experience, with positions you can act on. And Travel Search Pulse Daily: an automated morning roundup of travel and search news, every weekday.
The Daily deserves a word of explanation, because I’m doing something deliberate with it. There’s a set of publications I trust and read to stay on top of this industry. I built an AI pipeline that pulls the headlines from all of them every morning and reads them through an SEO lens, so I can see at a glance what’s happening, where, and what deserves a deeper look. It’s my radar. It makes me faster at spotting what matters and adapting to it, and it frees my reading time for the digging instead of the collecting. I built it for myself; it turned out to be too useful not to share. I’m transparent that it’s AI-assembled from my curated sources and my prompts, because knowing what to automate, and what still needs judgment, is a big part of what this job is now.
Subscribe and you’ll get the essays and the Daily in your inbox.
